WASHINGTON, DC - March 25 - Sixteen national religious organizations filed formal public comments today opposing the administration's plans to build a new nuclear bomb plant that would be wasteful, unneeded, and dangerous, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) announced today.

"As religious leaders in the United States, we firmly oppose the administration’s multi-billion dollar plan to rebuild the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities through the Department of Energy’s Complex Transformation proposal," declared a coalition of national Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Protestant groups in written comments submitted to the Energy Department at a public hearing in Washington, DC. "We call on our political leaders to show the moral and political courage necessary to bring about a shift in our nation’s nuclear weapons posture.”

The hearing is one of a series of public events the Energy Department is holding to assess the environmental impact of Complex Transformation, the proposed plan to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The centerpiece of this proposal is a new nuclear weapons plant for the production of plutonium pits, the primary detonators in modern nuclear weapons. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, located 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe, NM, is the site slated for the new bomb plant.

The religious groups express concern that the facility would be used to develop a new generation of nuclear warheads, despite the moral and legal obligations of the United States to reduce its weapons arsenal.

Read the full text of the statement (PDF), organized by FCNL and the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger, and see a list of signers.

Learn more about Complex Transformation and FCNL's nuclear program.

For more on the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger, see www.faithfulsecurity.org or contact Jessica Wilbanks at 505-758-1206 or jwilbanks@fourthfreedom.org.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation, the oldest registered religious lobby in Washington, is a non-partisan Quaker lobby in the public interest. FCNL works with a nationwide network of tens of thousands of people from every state in the U.S. to advocate for social and economic justice, peace, and good government.

###